Croton water system. 19th century aqueducts

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Much has been written about the Croton Dam as an engineering masterpiece of the 19th century, there is an excellent article by the author "he said himself" lots of good photos …

But I want to tell not so much about the dam itself, or the aqueduct through which water was supplied to New York, but about construction technologies, which from antiquity somehow suddenly appeared in the 19th century and, moreover, were not forgotten even at the beginning of the 20th century!

But first, all the same, about the Croton Dam and let the readers forgive me, who have already looked at the article on the link, I will show some photos again, but from a different point of view …

The Croton water system consists of three components - a dam with a reservoir, an aqueduct and a reservoir.

This bridge is the Croton aqueduct, metal spans were made in the 20th century for shipping..

And this is how the aqueduct looked before..

And this ominous, cyclopean structure Croton reservoir …

The history of the construction is somewhat "strange", supposedly, it began in 1836, there was some kind of old dam … and finished in 1906. Let's take a look at the construction site …

A cable car-type system was made that allowed moving, transporting blocks weighing up to six tons, I don't know how true this is … the cable car system on the blocks is clearly visible.

However, there are several photos that cast doubt on the fact that construction is taking place here, and not reconstruction with the help of antique architects "ordered" from Italy.

The last photo clearly shows that it was a destroyed structure and is being restored … this is of course my hypothesis, but it is too good for all the destruction that befell the cities of America by the middle of the 19th century …. well, then there was an EXHIBITION, of course, in New York in 1854, they don't like to talk about it…. but for some reason she also burned down!

Well, God bless them, with the destruction … so or not, but the dam was restored or built! I want to lead readers to the idea that antiquity, which we know with aqueducts, as an inalienable attribute, is the end of the 18th century at its best! I found a rare photo - the Croton aqueduct from the inside … don't pay attention to the naked woman in it … this is Mira Kim, an Asian woman who loves being photographed naked, but thanks to her unusual passion, we can see the aqueduct from the inside … and it is quite antique - sawn blocks on Romanesque cement - lime streaks on the walls.

Now let's compare the obviously antique aqueducts that miraculously stood for thousands of years …

So what's the difference with a 19th century aqueduct ??? Two thousand years between them ???

And this is an aqueduct in Sevastopol, it was allegedly restored by the occupation troops during the Crimean campaign

And this "millionth bridge" is also an aqueduct, in Moscow, built at the end of the 19th century, as it suddenly turned out that there is practically no drinking water in Moscow … by the way, it turns out that many aqueducts built in the 19th century are called bridges, well, the bridge is not an aqueduct, its construction in the 19th century is no longer striking a contradiction.

I want to draw your attention to the holes in the blocks, if these are large blocks, there must be holes, larger or smaller, round or square … now I know why they are

No one dragged anything with his hands or on a hump, made "holes" hammered a pin with a ring and hooked it to a system of ropes and blocks and moved …. here is antigravity for you!

So antiquity, this is the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, and then, somewhere in this time, something terrible happened that they tried to forget and knock it out of our heads. Here's an interesting photo of the Istanbul aqueduct … you see, and Stanbul got it not bad …

Dmitry Mylnikov's comment:

By the way, during my last trip to St. Petersburg the director of the company where I was at work told me that there is an "old" sewage system that runs under the city in the form of special tunnels. Everything is made of stone, the technologies are the same as at the embankments. They begin just above the city from the Neva, pass under the city and at the end go out into the Gulf of Finland. Height is greater than human height. The width is about two and a half meters. On the left and right, there are walkways a little less than half a meter wide, along which you can walk freely. The whole trick of the system is that water is constantly flowing there, which washes away everything that gets there. That is, throughout the entire system of canals, slopes are very accurately calculated and built so that the water flows by gravity.

It is believed that this system began to be built in the 18th century and finished in the 19th. Most of them are still valid.

I have no reason not to believe him, he has been dealing with engineering networks for a long time, including in St. Petersburg. At the same time, he is absolutely not our person, a techie with a classical Soviet education.